Abstract:
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) is a well calibrated passive microwave radiometer, similar to SSM/I, that contains lower frequency channels required for sea surface temperature (SST) retrievals. The TRMM is a joint venture between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to measure precipitation, water vapor, SST and wind in the global tropical ... regions and was launched in November 1997. The TRMM satellite travels west to east in a 402 km altitude semi-equatorial precessing orbit that results in day-to-day changes in the observation time of any given earth location between 38S and 38N. In contrast to infrared SST observations, microwave retrievals can be measured through most clouds, and are also insensitive to water vapor and aerosols. Remote Sensing Systems is the producer of these gridded TMI SST data for the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) Project. Although the product designation is "L2P_GRIDDED" it is in actuality a Level 3 Collated (L3C) product as defined in the GHRSST Data Processing Specification (GDS) version 2.0. Its "L2P_GRIDDED" name derives from a deprecated specification in the early Pilot Project phase of GHRSST (pre 2008) and has remained for file naming continuity. In this dataset, both ascending (daytime) and descending (daytime) gridded orbital passes on packaged into the same daily file.

Description:
Data may be directly downloaded from the NODC via the THREDDS (Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services) server at the URL listed in this metadata record. For more information see the NODC GHRSST project web site: URL: http://ghrsst.nodc.noaa.gov/

Description:
Simple Web access: Using any web browser, navigate to URL: http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/ghrsst and begin browsing through the file hierarchy. Clicking on any of the files will prompt you to download that file or will launch any application associated with netCDF files. For more information see the NODC GHRSST project web site: URL: http://ghrsst.nodc.noaa.gov/